A pharmaceutical company in London is buying Ben Venue’s generic injectable drug business for an amount that could reach $300 million.

Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC also could buy the Bedford company’s massive manufacturing plant, which shut down almost all drug production a few months ago after the company spent years trying to address quality control problems identified by federal regulators.

Hikma plans to retain “a number of employees across key business functions” within Ben Venue’s generic injectable drug business, which is called Bedford Laboratories, according to a news release from Hikma. About 100 Ben Venue employees primarily are assigned to the Bedford Labs business, according to a Ben Venue representative.

Hikma (LSE: HIK) (NASDAQ Dubai: HIK) (OTC: HKMPY) entered into an exclusivity agreement that would give the publicly traded company the right to acquire “substantially all of the assets of the Ben Venue manufacturing facility in Bedford,” according to the news release. Hikma said it was interested in acquiring “one of the largest sterile injectable manufacturing sites in the world.”

However, products marketed by Bedford Labs will be made at existing Hikma manufacturing plants in the United States, Germany and Portugal.

Bedford Labs owns “the third-largest portfolio of generic injectable products in the U.S.,” according to the release.

Hikma will acquire Bedford Labs’ portfolio of 84 drugs once the deal closes. It also is buying 27 drug candidates the company is developing, including 16 that are waiting for approval from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

Those drugs generated only $19 million in sales last year, due to manufacturing issues at Ben Venue’s plant in Bedford. Hikma expects sales of Bedford Labs’ products will increase to about $150 million by 2017.

Ben Venue had about 1,300 employees in mid-2011, making it Bedford’s largest employer. However, the company shut down all manufacturing toward the end of that year to address a long list of quality control problems cited by foreign and domestic regulators.

Ben Venue eventually restarted some manufacturing at the plant, but last year the company announced that it was giving up. It had spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix its problems, and it stood to lose another $700 million over the next five years if it kept going, according to the company.

However, Ben Venue has continued to help Johnson & Johnson manufacture Doxil, a cancer drug that became hard to find when Ben Venue stopped making it.

The deal with Hikma will make sure that Bedford Labs customers can continue buying the company’s products, according to Paul Fonteyne, chairman of Ben Venue’s board of directors.

“We believe that this is a positive development, allowing Hikma to leverage its existing infrastructure and manufacturing capabilities to re-introduce important products to the U.S. market, bringing significant benefit to patients,” said Fonteyne, who also is president and CEO of the U.S. arm of Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company that owns Ben Venue and Bedford Labs.

Hikma will pay Ben Venue $225 million in cash for Bedford Labs, and it could pay another $75 million over the next five years, if it hits certain performance-related milestones.

Hikma posted sales of $1.36 billion in 2013. About 40% of its sales, or $536 million, came from its injectable drugs business.